1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to processes for forming label structures, and more particularly pertains to a new process for making a label structure that includes at least a portion that may be marked after the assembly of the label structure so that information may be marked on the label after the label has been assembled, and may be marked even after application to a product.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Labels are typically printed or otherwise marked with all required information during the process in which the label structure is assembled, which facilitates the protection of the printed matter by, for example, the application to the surface of the label stock of a laminating material or a protective coating after the surface has been marked with a material such as ink.
In many situations, however, a packager or the ultimate user of a label needs or desires to perform some additional marking or printing on a label after the label structure has been assembled by the label supplier and delivered to the packager. For example, a packager may need to add indicia to the label such as a lot number or expiration date to the label before or after the label is applied to the container for the product. This marking may be done using a thermal printer, a dot-matrix printer, a laser printer, and the like. Increasingly more popular, the laser of a laser printer, rather than depositing ink or other residue to the label, actually removes some previously applied ink from the surface of the label stock to reveal an area of the base material of the label stock, and thereby creates a marking on the label surface that contrasts with the ink on the surrounding area of the label surface.
As previously mentioned, it is common in the production of label structures to use an overlaminate layer or material over substantially the entirety of the base material of the label to provide protection for the label stock and the markings thereon. However, the laser printing technique does not satisfactorily work when the overlaminate layer is placed over the base material as the laser does not sufficiently penetrate through or remove material from the laminate layer, which is typically transparent in nature and does not take the application of ink. Therefore, if an overlaminate is to be applied to the label structure, the laminate layer has generally been selectively applied to areas of the label that do not need to be marked in a process after the label is assembled. This technique tends to be difficult to employ in the label structure forming process, as the laminate layer is typically formed of a strip of laminating material that is adhered to the face of the label structure, and forming holes in the laminate prior to adhering the laminate to the base material can be difficult.
Thus, it is believed that there remains a need for a simple and highly effective manner of producing a label structure that may be marked in a post-assembly process while still employing an overlaminate.